First time poster, sorry if this has already been discussed somewhere, but my friends and I have been very excited for Guild Wars 2 for a long time and are enjoying it immensely, but I have some serious concerns with how guilds function...

Our guild is small and on two different worlds, one in North America, one in Europe. From what I can tell so far, aside from the Guild Emblem, things that we "build" in one world do not carry across to the other.

For example, our European members just build a guild stash but we in NA don't get access to it. That essentially doubles the workload to build any of these things and really, we might as well not be in the same guild...

It feels like a huge step backwards from Guild Wars 1... does anyone else share these feelings or am I missing something or just getting old and grumpy?

Your feelings are shared by many, in particular those with international guilds. Perhaps the most currently irritating thing besides all of that, is the fact I can't even send anything to any of my other guildies on other servers via mail. It's a few little things like this, along with lack of guild features and enjoyment of togetherness overall as a whole that sort of runs contrary to what the game was supposed to be about. Why even be in the same guild indeed.

Ok good, I'm glad it's not just me I very much enjoy how influence works and being rewarded for completing events with my guild mates, it would just be a lot more fulfilling if the rewards would be shared with everyone in the guild. I understand there's probably large guilds where it's not a problem, but I should be ok with running a tiny guild. It is called "Guild" Wars afterall

The reason given for doing this was for WvW. So that a guild members on server A earns loads of influence, which can then be used to trade/get advantage to for guild members on Server B.

While I kinda get the logic, this seems like an inelegant solution and another example where the community aspects have been sacrficed for WvW. A more elegant solution is to stop anything that would imbalance WvW from being cross server while keeping the stuff that would not (XP, guild banks etc etc) to be cross server.

Instead we get a blanket embago, rather than specific. What I did hear was that you might be able to access the guild bank and benefits if you guest to that server. But again you'd be faced with people 'smuggling' items acoss.